Menu

travel, art and photography

art journal

” … you take them with you and don’t let them hold you back for long.”

I’ll be going on a roadtrip this coming weekend, though I guess compared to my last one, it could hardly be called one. This time we’re headed up to Colorado only, instead of the last coalition of states and national parks that eventually ended with my Jeep a little worse for the wear. It’s doing just fine now of course, though I can’t help but think it’s probably heaving a giant sigh of relief this weeklong vacation will actually be closer to an actual “vacation” than the last adventure.

Or at least thats what i’m saying now.

Apart from a vague list of places i’d like to see and explore in and around the Denver area and a loose handful elsewhere (Trinidad, Great Sand Dunes, Garden of the Gods) , there’s really no set plans for this trip. Which is both par for the course when it comes to me and also terrifying when I think I could end up wasting a week in beautiful Colorado if I don’t plan things out to the last second. Life has a funny way of always messing with my plans though, so maybe for once not having any real ones will be to my benefit.

Either way- wish me luck, good light, halfway decent weather and an abundance of coffee to keep me going.

I feel like I blinked once, twice and by the third time the month had rushed on by. Any plans I had to wander around the DFW area this month have taken a backseat to art projects, catching up with friends, obsessing over Yuri!!! On Ice (and that last one was completely unexpected let me tell you), working on writing projects and getting my work out routine back on track. Also tack on watching way too much HGTV with the bf and drinking so many fruit smoothies I’ll probably start having dreams of strawberries soon.

Music on Repeat:
Moscow- Autoheart
Goodnight Gotham- Rihanna
Nuvole bianche- Ludovico Einaudi12 Violin Concertos, Op.4-“La stravaganza”– Vivaldi (if you’ve about an hour or so to spare, give it a listen)
Prosthetic Love- Typhoon
We Don’t Eat- James Vincent McMorrow
Death of a Bachelor- Panic! At the Disco
Varúô- Sigur Rós

For those of you that have never visited North Texas in the winter time, lucky you. I don’t make a habit of hating the weather- of all the things to waste energy on – but while i’ve come around to the frankly astonishingly temperamental weather patterns here in this lovely corner of the US of A, the winter time takes the cake. These past 2 weeks have been filled with heat and sunshine, thunderstorms, sleet and flurries of snow, humid rain and more cold snaps than anyone could count.

With that in mind, finding a sunny weekend afternoon to devote to art projects was an unexpected joy and I made the most it before I succumbed to laziness and the need to lounge on the couch.

Ambitions/Projects for this Week:
-Catching up on my snailmail (couple of posts coming up on that later on) and spending my lunch hours at work scribbling travel wishes to friends

– Re-writing a good chunk of my first effort at a modern fantasy novel, the Ocean Is Spilling. Which at this point is just me clicking around multiple screens on my laptop/display furiously and talking to myself in the car a lot.

– Finished up my Bastille inspired art piece (lyrics from their song “The Anchor” ) and sketching out some rough drafts of my next topography mountains piece

– Find a way to motivate myself to get my weekly workouts up from 2 a week to at least 4 (eventually the goal is to get up to 6 a week plus two extra on the weekends…this is perhaps a bit much for a person who still regularly takes the elevator up to the second floor instead of taking the stairs but hey, dream big yeah?)

Progress on the whole “reading more fiction books in 2017” thing:
Since last year I read literally zero fiction books, preferring instead to drown myself in travel guides and economics, I decided to make it a resolution for myself to read more of them this year. That goal is…not going so great. So far out of the 4 books/graphic novels I had set myself to read for this month, i’ve only read Volume 4 of the Fables comic series by Bill Willingham and gone about a third of the way through The Girl on The Train by Paula Hawkins. I still have Volume 5 of Fables and the Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman to read this month but unless I find the motivation to get through the Girl on the Train, not sure how likely it will be to finish those as well.

Technically, the subtitle of my blog is “travel, art and photography” but I really wouldn’t blame anyone if they thought all I posted about was traveling, since thats literally all thats been going on here for the past oh, 6 months? So this is a bit of a….I wouldn’t say warning, but a heads up I guess, for anyone that clicked to follow this blog on the basis of my travel posts alone.

My next trip isn’t until the middle of March (Colorado!) and while i’m planning some small adventures between now and then around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, i’m definetly diving back into art more until then. And while I really hope anyone who’s stuck around for the travel posts will still be around by the time the next adventure rolls around, I understand if you guys kinda fade in the background for a bit.

I have three or four more posts to put up on here from the Big Bend trip (who said I was getting better at not procrastinating? I owe you a drink) but life’s been a series of ups and downs this past week and a half and so, here we are with with an Art Journal Monday as a bit of a placeholder while I get my life together.

On the positive side, my next adventure has been booked and planned out finally. The first two weeks of October will consist of me heading on my most ambitious roadtrip yet and stops include : Yellowstone (WY), Grand Tetons (WY) , Yosemite(CA) , Death Valley(CA), Las Vegas (NV) Joshua Tree(CA), Salton Sea (CA) and Carlsbad Caverns(NM). Should be sufficiently epic I think, as this will probably be my last roadtrip before I set my sights firmly on overseas traveling.